LDAP Background Information
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4/8/2010
LDAP is a protocol designed to be a lightweight front-end to a X.500 directory or stand-alone directory service, such as Microsoft Active Directory, over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). LDAP is a client-server protocol that enables users to locate a specific set of information and other resources such as files and devices on a network. Protocol elements are carried directly over TCP or UDP, thereby bypassing much of the session/presentation overhead that is required for other directory services, such as X.500. LDAP uses a lightweight basic encoding rule (BER) notation to encode all protocol elements.